Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

Collaboration and the power of the merging of music and dance to tell a story is a creative experience that can be life-altering for both the maker and the consumer. This presentation will tell the origin, process and outcomes of the creation of the screen dance film titled Embers & Ash, a student and faculty collaboration exploring ideas of the collective and individual in the context of the erosion of place and people. The piece features two pieces of music from composers on opposite sides of the world. The first, Falling Embers by Ella Macans, was originally composed as a meditation for peace and relief from the fires that raged across the Australian landscape in the summer of 2019-20. Tracing a glowing particle suspended above desolate land where all has been lost and destroyed, the piece explores the idea of the last moments of something – the final glow before life burns out. The second piece, Silent Canyons by Nathan Daughtrey, was inspired of by the story of the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples or Anasazi (a Navajo word meaning “ancient ones” or “ancient enemies”) and their disappearance from the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States in the 13th century. It seeks to follow this evolution of a civilization being built in these previously uninhabited caves, the conflicts that arose with other peoples, the disappearance of the people, and returning to the emptiness of the canyons.